Category Archives: Gun-“Free” Zones

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My entire adult life, I’ve considered the Bill of Rights inviolable – with the idea that they’re timeless principles, without which the idea of “Freedom” is pretty much meaningless. I took to heart the saying attributed to Ben Franklin – “He who would trade freedom for security deserves neither”.

But recent events have caused me, after much difficult thinking, to have a change of heart.

It’s time to change one of the Amendments in the BIll of Rights. Not *repeal* it – just change it. *To save lives*.

I’ll be announcing the amendment, and why, on the show tomorrow. 1PM on AM1280.

Stephen Willeford managed to shoot Devin Kelley before jumping in another man’s truck and chasing him down, the Daily Mail reported.

Texas Department of Public Safety chief Freeman Martin said Willeford “grabbed his rifle and engaged the suspect” after Kelley left the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, where he opened fire with an assault rifle and killed 26 people.

And just as law enforcement teaches about mass shootings these days – if you show a mass shooter any resistance, they usually break off the attack, and either give up or kill themselves.

The man who killed at least 26 people in a Baptist church in a rural Texas town on Sunday died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Wilson County Sheriff Joe Tackitt told CBS News in an interview on Monday morning.

Tackitt said gunfire was exchanged between the gunman and two armed citizens during a vehicle chase after the shootings.

The church was a gun-free zone – naturally. But the rest of Texas was not.

Berg’s 18th Law is still in effect; we don’t know what motivated the Vegas shooter.

But I take heart from this, a guy I’m proud to call a real American hero:

Mandalay Bay being a gun free zone (and at 400 yards, firing back with a handgun would have been a triumph of optimism over feasibility), the man fought back with the only weapon allowed him, his middle finger – which, were the First Amendment all one needed to protect freedom, would be a fearsome weapon, and was, as it happens the best he could do under the circumstances.

On Tuesday afternoon, the FBI confirmed the motives of the recent shooting attack at Fort Lauderdale Airport in Florida. The assailant, Esteban Santiago, claimed to carry out the attack in the name of the Islamic State.

During Santiago’s bond hearing, FBI special agent Michael Ferlazzo confirmed that he did carry out the attack in the name of the Islamic State, according to CNN. At this point, it is not yet clear if he is linked with the terrorist group or if it was a lone-wolf, IS-inspired attack like dozens of others that have recently taken place (Nice, France, Berlin, Germany, Orlando, FL, etc.).

While Florida is a shall-issue state, all civilian carry is banned in Florida airports.

Which is why Santiago was unable to carry out his attack, and nobody died. Right?

The FBI released the details of their initial investigation into the Saint Cloud mall mass stabbing last month, including the first public look at the store video. MPR News covered it.

Warning; the video is graphic, if you haven’ been completely desensitized to violence:

The investigators also praised Jason Falconer.

Falconer’s actions are instructive to anyone who is a carry permittee, and – with a little luck – to voters this fall:

Thornton said Adan had asked Falconer if he was Muslim. Falconer, said no but saw the knives and identified himself as an officer.

Adan initially turned away from Falconer and the officer followed repeating that he was law enforcement and ordering the man to drop the weapons.

If you were a citizen with a carry permit and a legally-carried handgun, at this point, you’d have a bit of a conundrum.

The Minnesota self-defense statute allows lethal force in self-defense to protect one’s self “or another” from death or great bodily harm. But case law also establishes a “duty to retreat” (outside one’s home) – you have to undertake all “reasonable” means to avoid the use of lethal force.

What is “reasonable?” For your purposes as a citizen, that will be decided by a county attorney. As Joel Rosenberg used to say, while you, the citizen, had seconds to decide whether to defend yourself or not, under immense stress, often under low-light or confusing conditions, with a lethal threat bearing down on you, the county attorney will take days or weeks, in a well-lit, warm office, with sheriff’s deputies guarding him, to decide that question. And at the end of the day, it’ll likely be at least in part a political decision; a DFLer will often file charges (although we’ve been surprised in the past), while a DA in Kandiyohi or Pennington counties will hail the shooter as a hero.

In other words, it’s vague. Intentionally so; county attorneys like to have lots of discretion; they don’t like to have to work under all sorts of immutable rules any more than you do. Of course, you and I don’t hold peoples’ lives, freedom and lifes’ savings in the palms of our hands, either.

That was the crux of the”Stand your Ground” law that passed the Minnesota legislature in 2012 with a decisive bipartisan majority, only to get vetoed by a governor who was acting as a marionette of big-money anti-gun special interests; put the benefit of the doubt on the side of the law-abiding citizen.

Oh, yeah – and the next time some gabbling anti-gun hamster asks “why does anyone need more than seven shots?”, you can show them what happened in Saint Cloud; Jason Falconer is an expert “three-gun” competition marksman and marksmanship instructor, an absolute master of the craft of putting pieces of lead into things.

And here’s what happened (I’ve added emphasis):

“Upon following Adan into Macy’s and repeatedly announcing his authority and commands to drop the knives, Adan ran toward Falconer with the knives raised two separate times, then continued to crawl toward him with a knife in his hand even after being shot during to separate prior charges at the officer,” Thornton said.

Falconer fired 10 rounds, striking Adan six times, he added. Store video showed Falconer shooting while backing away from Adan as the attacker continued to approach with his back turned.

Adan fell to the ground multiple times after being shot and still had a knife in hand. He tried to get up a final time using a store sign for balance.

So – an expert marksman (and cop) fires ten shots at contact range, and misses four times (which is actually abnormally good, even for point-blank range engagements); he scores six hits, during most of which the attacker kept charging.

If the shooter had been less expert, and hit the attacker fewer times? If the attacker had been high, or dissociative? If the defender had a smaller-caliber firearm (Falconer’s pistol was a 9mm)? If the defender didn’t have any unobstructive, flat, clean room to back-pedal away from a charging man with two knives?

If there’d been more than one attacker?

Even with a “large” magazine, a defender in that situation could very well have learned what a Thanksgiving turkey feels like.

(The kind where criminals have guns, and use them on each other and on their innocent victims. Not the “law-abiding citizens can protect themselves” kind of “gun problem” that so exercises Minnesota’s “gun safety” community).

Rep. Keith Ellison introduced the Campus Gun Policy Transparency Act which would require colleges to disclose their policies relating to guns on campus. He claims existing federal law requires colleges to publish campus safety information but not specific policies related to guns. In addition, he claims colleges are not required to report gun-related crime statistics.

“Students have a right to know if their fellow students are bringing guns to class.”

No, they don’t. They don’t have a right to know if their fellow students had an abortion, voted for Democrats, worship in a mosque or drive a Prius. Those are all private activities, nobody’s business but your own.

There is no evidence that guns on campus cause crime (and that’s not due to lack of reporting statistics – if there were lots of shootings on campus, emergency room records would be conclusive proof).

The only possible reason for requiring a federal campus gun policy but not a campus abortion policy, mosque policy or campus Prius policy, it to chill Second Amendment rights.

So, pretty much par for the course for Democrats.

Joe Doakes

To a conservative, rights are endowed to us by our creator.

To a liberla, “rights” are perks granted to us by a benevolent government.

Alhough, at least anecdotally, people in Saskatchewan and Alberta were the least obedient to Canada’s gun control laws when they were passed.

But I digress:

Idaho at that point had a shall-issue concealed weapon license law (now, no licenses are required). I can buy a gun without background check or waiting period, either at a licensed dealer or a gun show. Friends own machine guns, completely legally. Idaho is very similar demographically to Saskatechewan, Alberta, and Manitoba. If gun availability or porous borders make , Idaho should be substantially worse than those Canadian provinces, not better. Of course the gun control nuts don’t care about murder rates; this is really about cultural disparagement.

…to the clueless; Chicago – the city with all the gun control that “ProtectMN” and Michael Bloomberg want (with the possible exception of “the disarmament of everyone else”) is seeing violence at a record clip:

July 2016 was the “deadliest July in 10 years” for heavily gun-controlled Chicago: Sixty-five individuals were shot and killed.
Moreover, according to the Chicago Tribune, such death figures do not set a new record — they simply tie a record set in 2006, when 65 individuals were killed in the month of July. This brings Chicago’s homicide total to “nearly 400” for the first seven months of 2016 alone. The number of homicides for the whole year of 2015 was 490.

“Assault weapons” are banned. It’s exceptionally difficult for a law-abiding citizen to get a carry permit (although two of them have prevented mass shootings in the past couple of years alone); gun stores are essentially banned. There is no way to measure the ratio of guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens to criminals, but it has to be among the lowest in the country.

The media’s chicken littles parroted the narrative they so, so desperately wish, hope, pray is true; that the average, law-abiding American citizen, left to his own devices and all of his human rights, is a fundamentally depraved actor, motivated by rage and hate, looking for an excuse to stick it to someone.

At worst, it’s the ultimate manifestation of Berg’s Seventh Law; the left is transferring their own manifest rage onto their enemies.

At best? They’re wishing they had a lot more company among the ranks of America’s depraved.

And it’s just not happening. The media warned us that open civilian carry, legal in Ohio, would end up in a bloodbath.

The New York Times ominously reported: “However, given the recent tumult around the country, some leaders are anxious that the environment could turn dangerous. Members of one group made up of current and former members of the military called the Oath Keepers, who have shown up at other tense events heavily armed, say they again plan to carry weapons into Cleveland.”
NPR forewarned: “With tens of thousands of protesters expected in Cleveland, those gun laws could mean confrontations between pistol-packing delegates and protesters.”

And Vanity Fair cautioned about a security nightmare: “In the wake of a deadly sniper attack during a protest last week in Dallas, where open-carry laws reportedly made it difficult for police to tell the difference between potential suspects and marchers carrying legal firearms, there are rising concerns that similar open-carry laws in Ohio risk turning the Republican National Convention into a security nightmare.”

What – you want to tell me that a public union boss who’s an integral part of the machine in a major city that’s been run into the ground by decades of Democrat rule, doesn’t understand the concept of civil rights or the constitution?

SCENE: Mitch BERG is working on the potato boxes in his backyard. Avery LIBRELLE walks through the back gate into BERG’s back yard.

LIBRELLE: Hey, Merg! The case of workplace violence in Orlando proves that it’s time for America to get serious about guns.

BERG: We did. Or at least parts of the country did; the parts that ratcheted up the penalties for gun crimes, and seriously prosecuted straw buyers, saw a marked decrease in gun crimes. Of course, that wasn’t “sexy” enough for the Democrat-run governments of most major cities – so while the rest of the nation’s crime rate plummets, in major Democrat-run cities it’s rising…

BERG: It showed that a cop working security was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that Mateen, unlike most mass shooters, didn’t fold up when he ran into resistance. As might befit someone who was carrying out a terror attack, as opposed to someone just seeking immortality as a spree killer. That’s just a theory…

LIBRELLE: …I’m still bored.

BERG: Well, bore yourself with this; had a any person in that club had a legal, permitted firearm, they could have stopped the shooting.

LIBRELLE: Can you guarantee that?

BERG: There are no guarantees in life. But I’d like to talk you through three hypothetical scenarios.

LIBRELLE: Don’t make me bored!

BERG: What’s with the boredo…oh, never mind .

Scenario 1: You’re out at a bar. Someone starts shooting. People around you are getting hit left and right.

Suddenly, a schlub nearby sees an opportunity while the shooter is shooting the other way; they draw their legal handgun, and they kill the attacker.

LIBRELLE: That’s unrealistic.

BERG: Why?

LIBRELLE: The attacker would shoot them first. They’d sense they were about to be attacked, and turn and kill them. Which would just make it worse for everyone else in the club.

But that brings us to the second scenario. Let’s say a citizen draws, and misses, or doesn’t kill the shooter, and the shooter kills the citizen. That’d be tragic – but it’d throw the shooter’s plan off, and give people time to escape in the confusion, and probably safe at least a few lives.

LIBRELLE: You’re dreaming.

BERG: Well, it’s happened. But it probably beats the third scenario.

LIBRELLE: Which is?

BERG: (Very, very quietly, with an air of fervent, quiet concentration). You’re at a bar. (LIBRELLE listens intently; BERG continues, quietly). Shooting rings out. People are dying left and right. But the bar is a gun-free zone, and everyone in the bar followed the law tonight. So there’s exactly one armed person in the joint – the mass shooter, motivated by hate, or desire for immortality, or on a terror mission. And the shooter keeps on going, blasting away, killing defenseless person after defenseless person (BERG grows quieter, leaning toward LIBRELLE, who leans closer as well), killing everyone around you until…

(BERG stops)

LIBRELLE: Until wha…

BERG: (At a whisper) he lifts his gun, and (BERG yells at the top of his lungs) BOOM! RIGHT AFTER YOU PROJECTILE CRAP YOURSELF WITH FEAR, HE BLOWS YOUR F****NG HEAD INTO A MILLION F****NG PIECES ALL OVER THE WALL!

At age 14, he said he could shoot an AK-47 and mimicked an airplane flying into the World Trade Center. At 26, he bragged to courthouse co-workers of terrorist ties. Weeks ago, at 29, Mateen sought to buy heavy-duty body armor and bulk ammunition.

Many of his violent outbursts aped or celebrated Islamic terrorism and he repeatedly claimed connections to known terrorists, including the Boston Marathon bombers. He cheered the 9/11 attacks on the day they happened and once threatened to shoot partygoers at a barbecue when pork, which is forbidden to Muslims, touched his hamburger.

Bear in mind that Mateen passed not one, but eight background checks:

So let’s walk through this from the beginning:

Mateen spends his entire life as a vocal terror sympathizer. He also meets all the right people – has contact with other known terror figures, the whole nine yards.

The feds investigate him at least twice. Maybe they found nothing. Maybe political pressure led then to foreshorten their inquiry; maybe to avert accusations of “profiling” they took their resources to investigate NASCAR drivers in Alabama. We don’t know, and probably never will.

Mateen passes eight of the background checks that are the “common sense regulation” that the orcs of Big Gun Control want to subject the law-abiding citizen to – which is further evidence that they don’t care about crime, but do want to register gun owners.

Mateen – who was either in the midst of a struggle over sexuality, or was adopting a “gay” cover to case gay bars for his attacks – becomes enough of a regular figure in Orlando gay bars to not arouse notice.

For their part, the State of Florida made all bars “gun free zones”; every victim at “Pulse” was, by law, disarmed. While gun owners in many states – the states where “gun free zones” are treated as trespassing rather than misdemeanors or worse – routinely ignore “gun free zone” signs, nobody at “Pulse” apparently did.

You are the leaders of Minnesota’s gun-grabber movement. You and your wan little pack of Volvo-driving, alpaca-wearing, NPR-listening, St. Olaf-graduating, ELCA-coiffed followers want to take away Minnesotans’ right and means to defend themselves.

Now, crime in Minnesota is very, very low – and a higher percentage of Minnesotans have carry permits than Texans. Crime is lowest of all in places where the number of legally-carried guns is the highest.

And vice versa.

So you all live in your hideaways in Kenwood, Saint Anthony Park, Crocus Hill, Rochester and Saint Louis Park, in part made safer by the deterrent effect of all of us shooters.

So why not make an integrity move, and eschew that deterrence?

Put one of these babies in your yard:

Show America’s gun culture that you patently reject the collateral benefit of their – our – prudence!

Tell Minnesota – all Minnesotans – that you trust all 5.5 million of your neighbors to stay honest. Tell them that you implicitly trust that if something goes hinky, that you trust the police will be there fast enough to make a difference.

You do trust the police to protect you, just as you want us to trust them – don’t you?

Tyler Gottwalt strapped on an AK47 and took a walk. He was looking for trouble…

…in pretty much the same way Martin Luther King was. He set out to flush out an illegal law.

And he found it. While the Sauk Rapids cops knew the law – citizens with carry permits are allowed to carry uncased long arms in public – the Saint Cloud PD didn’t. They arrested Gottwalt, citing a city ordinance.

We’ll let the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance take up the story next:

As Professor Olson notes in the video, Saint Cloud can’t regulate guns differently than the state does, due to the state’s pre-emption ordinance. Which makes the SCPD’s arrest an illegal one.

The Early ’70s – the National Coalition to Ban Handguns distributes signs indicating that the home is “proud to be gun-free”.

They made the usual, predictable media splash – the nation’s opinion-pushers were pretty roundly anti-gun in those days, and they’d done a pretty fair job of bandwagoning a good chunk of American opinion into line with them.

But then a funny thing happened.

The robbery rates in “gun-free homes” shot through the roof; owners of posted homes found that they were being robbed at a rate vastly, vastly, utterly, screamingly, almost satirically higher than their neighbors.

So the signs disappeared almost as fast as the “no guns allowed” signs vanished from Twin Cities bars after “gun-free” bars found themselves getting stuck up at an alarming rate.

UPDATE: Hah! It look like the “red light” story is from a satire site! The story is fake…

…but accurate.

In other words, I’ve fallen for a line that is devoid of fact. Just like Senator Latz, Representatives Norton and Schoen, Heather Martens, the Right Reverend Nancy Nord Bence, Joan Peterson and Nick Coleman. Only mine doesn’t trample the Constitution and get innocent people killed.

Missouri Democrat introduces an amendment to “prove a point” about the “absurdity” of open carry…

…and loses track of time, and is unable to withdraw the amendment.

Rep Deb Lavender (D) introduced an amendment to a bill dealing with open carry and [concealed carry permittees]. Her amendment would open the capitol building up to lawful carry of firearms for every lawful citizen rather than just for the elected officials.

I think she was about to withdraw the amendment during her closing argument when she talked her way through the 1 minute limit for her closing speech and the speaker slammed the gavel and opened the board for her amendment to be voted on.

SHE TALKED SO LONG SHE RAN OUT OF TIME TO WITHDRAW HER AMENDMENT.

The amendment passed with about 115 voting YES and now the proposed bill is an even stronger 2nd amendment bill because of her amendment.”

“Did your French gun control stop a single [expletive] person from dying at the Bataclan?” Hughes said. “And if anyone can answer yes, I’d like to hear it, because I don’t think so. I think the only thing that stopped it was some of the bravest men that I’ve ever seen in my life charging head-first into the face of death with their firearms.”

The left’s answer, inevitably, is a series of academic postulates that wither as fast as the crowd at Bataclan under reasoned scrutiny, to say nothing of real-life events.

Dear MOA: With all due respect: QQQQ.

The only reasoned response? You, and you alone, are responsible for your and your family’s protection. And while the world is demonstrably safer than it was, 20 and 70 and 200 years ago, human nature means that evil, some time, some place, will be waiting for someone, somewhere – whether in the form of a lone mugger, a couple of rapists, a gang of terrorists, or a government full of gangsters.

By the way – there’s been four terror-related mass shootings, and ten terror attacks altogether, since the Charlie Hebdo massacre, with a total death toll of 152, and 388 injured.

In Zürich, where handgun carry permits are relatively plentiful? Holding steady at zero and zero. While correlation doesn’t equal causation, it fits a pattern that we see here in the US, and that they saw in Israel in the seventies; terrorists (like delusional mass-shooters in general) avoid places where there might be resistance.

Panera is the latest large chain to succumb to the blandishments of “Harpies For A Criminal-Safe World” “Moms Want Action” (a fully-owned subsidiary of Michael Bloomberg).

Bakery-cafe chain Panera Bread has joined a growing list of retailers including Starbucks and Target by announcing that customers should leave their guns at home.

It makes no difference to me – I have eaten at Panera exactly thrice, and the last two, it was because someone else was picking up the tab. I never ever really want an $8 grilled cheese sandwich that bad.

In the weeks and months leading up to this policy announcement, Panera Bread sought advice from Michael Bloomberg-backed Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, now part of the former Mayor’s $50 million Everytown nonprofit.

Behind every dumb decision about guns…

“Panera deserves our thanks and our congratulations for taking this important step, and I applaud the company for proactively consulting Moms Demand Action as it developed and implemented its policy,” said the group’s founder Shannon Watts, who has herself become the focus of ire from open carry activists and the NRA in recent months following efforts to see retailers and restaurant chains change their firearms policies.

And everyone deserves Moms Want Action’s(a fully-owned subsidiary of Michael Bloomberg) thanks for taking this action, which will end “gun violence” at Panera restraurants nationwide…

And the city’s murder rate is setting new records; January saw 51 homicides, the bloodiest January since the gory days of the ’90s.

Gang conflicts and retaliatory violence drove the “unacceptable” increase in homicides, the police department said in a statement. But the rise in violence also notably comes as the Chicago Police Department faces increased scrutiny following the court-ordered release of a police video showing a white police officer fatally shooting a black teenager 16 times, and as the department implements changes in how it monitors street stops by officers.

Chicago routinely records more homicides annually than any other American city, but the grim January violence toll marks a shocking spike in violence in a city that recorded 29 murders for the month of January last year and 20 murders for the month in 2014. In addition to the jump in killings, police department said that it recorded 241 shooting incidents for the month, more than double the 119 incidents recorded last January.

Some on the left – including, I suspect, Kim Norton – might think that the spike in violence is despite the city’s intransigence on guns in the hands of the law-abiding.

Told that the State Capitol Police wanted to hold “active shooter” training for the legislature and its staff, Rep. Kim Norton decided to introduce a bill repealing last year’s law allowing law-abiding carry permittees to have their legally-carried firearms in the Capitol complex.